My grandfather nodded and said since the house was small, a good size for a young family, perhaps they would care to be married from this house instead, a mark of his approval; he liked that they weren’t spending too much of the money on something more grand. My grandmother had already gathered up the two mothers to begin discussing in low voices the messengers to be sent, the people to be invited, as Isaac and Basia came to me together, both of them smiling, and Basia held her hand out to me and said, “Promise us you will be there to dance at our wedding, Miryem! It is the only gift we ask of you.”
I managed to smile back and said that I would. But the candles were burning down, and it was not the only betrothal to be finalized that night. In the midst of their happy noise I began to hear sleigh bells ringing, too high and with a strange tone. They grew louder and louder until they were at the door, heavy stamping hooves up and down, and then a thump of a fist upon the door, knocking. No one else noticed. They kept on talking and laughing and singing, even though their voices seemed to me muffled beneath that enormous echoing sound.
I slowly left them all in the sitting room and walked down the hall. The casket full of gold was still standing in the entry, half hidden beneath the coats and wraps heaped upon the rack; we had all somehow forgotten it. I opened the door, and outside on the white road stood an open sleigh, narrow and sleek and made of pale wood, with four of the deerlike creatures harnessed with white leather, with a driver on the seat and two footmen hanging on behind, all of them bloodless-pale and tall like—my Staryk, I suppose I had to think of him, although they were nothing nearly so grand. They wore their white hair in a single braid, only a few sparkling beads here and there, and their clothes were all in shades of grey.
Their lord was standing on the threshold, and he had come in ceremony: he wore a crown this time, a band of gold and silver around his forehead with points that unfurled like the sharp leaves of holly, with clear jewels set in the center of each one. He wore white leather, and a white cloak trimmed in white fur, more of the clear crystals hanging from the edge like a fringe made of glass. He looked at me from his height with an angry and dissatisfied air, his mouth turned down, as though he didn’t like what he saw. What was there for him to like? I was wearing my own best dress, my sleeves embroidered around the wrists in red and my skirt in the same color, my wool vest and apron patterned in orange, but none of it was extravagant: the clothes of a merchant’s daughter, nothing more, even the small gold buttons on my vest and the collar of black fur only the mark of a little prosperity. Small and dark and wren-colored, and entirely absurd as a wife for him; I blurted before he even spoke, “You can’t want to marry me. What will anyone think?”
His mouth grew even more displeased and his eyes knived. “What I have promised, I will do,” he hissed at me, “though all the world will end for it. Have you my silver changed for gold?”
He didn’t even sound malicious this time, as though he’d given up hope of my failing. I bent down and seized the lid of the casket and threw it open where it stood amid the coats and woolen wraps; I could not even have pushed it to his feet by myself. “There!” I said. “Take it, and leave me alone; it’s only nonsense, to marry me when you don’t want to, and I don’t want to. Why didn’t you just promise me a trifle?”
“Only a mortal could speak so of offering false coin, and returning little for much,” he said, contempt dripping, and I glared at him, glad to be angry instead of afraid.
“My account books are clean,” I said, “and I don’t call it a reward to be dragged from my home and my family.”
“Reward?” the Staryk said. “Who are you to me, that I should reward you? You are the one who demanded fair return for a proven gift of high magic; did you think I would degrade myself by pretending to be one of the low, unable to match it? I am the lord of the glass mountain, not some nameless wight, and I leave no debts unpaid. You are thrice proven, thrice true—no matter by what unnatural chance,” he added, sounding unreasonably bitter about it, “—and I shall not prove false myself, whatever the cost.”
He held his hand out to me, and I said in desperation, “I don’t even know your name!”
He glared at me in outrage as enormous as if I had demanded he cut off his own head. “My name? You think to have my name? You shall have my hand, and my crown, and content yourself therewith; how dare you demand still more of me?”
He seized my wrist, burning cold where his gloved fingers brushed me, and then he jerked me through the doorway. The cold faded out of me like a sunrise running across the wide river, even though I stood in that white forest with snow under my soft house boots and not even a shawl around my shoulders. I tried to get free of him. His grip was monstrously strong, but when I flung my whole weight against it, he only let me go. I tumbled into the snow, and scrambled up, turning at the same time, meaning to run.
But there was nowhere to go. There was only the road stretching into the white trees behind me and going on in front of me, and no sight anywhere of my grandfather’s door or the city walls. Only the bone-white casket remained, standing open in front of me. In the cold light of the forest, the gold standing in it shone as though sunlight had been trapped inside every coin, and they might run like melted butter if you picked them up.
The two footmen came past me and closed the lid carefully, almost reverentially. In their faces I saw the same yearning I had seen in the market, people’s eyes caught by the fairy silver. They lifted the casket with equal care, but easily, though my grandfather’s two stout men had only carried it with grunting effort. I turned, following it with my eyes as they carried it to the sleigh, and came back round to my Staryk lord. He flicked a hand at me, peremptorily.
What was I to do? I went to him, graceless in the deep snow, and clambered into the sleigh after him. The only comfort I had was that he held himself rigidly straight and apart from me, as much as he could without shrinking even a finger’s width from the center of the sleigh. “Go,” he said sharply to the driver, and with a quick shake of the harness bells we were off down the wide white road, flying. There was a coverlet of white furs at the foot of the sleigh, and I pulled it up over my knees for the small comfort of soft fur inside my clenching fingers. I didn’t feel the cold at all.
*
Magreta and I sat together in my father’s study, waiting to be summoned. I could hear the music from downstairs already, but he meant the evening’s entertainment to go on for a while before I made my entrance, not grand but subtle, coming in quietly to sit at my stepmother’s side. Magreta was still sewing, talking brightly of all the linen goods that were yet necessary to my bride’s chest, except her voice trailed away into silence for a few moments whenever I moved my hand and her eyes caught on the silver ring. When Galina had come to tell me to go wait in the study, even she had paused and looked at me, faintly puzzled.
I didn’t try to sew. I had a book from off my father’s shelf in my lap, a rare pleasure I couldn’t enjoy. I stared down at the painting of the storyteller and the sultan, a thready shadow-creature taking shape out of the smoke of the brazier between her weaving hands, and I couldn’t even reach the end of a sentence. Outside the window I could see the snow still coming. It had begun to fall suddenly late this afternoon, very thick, as if to taunt me by making impossible an already-absurd escape.
A roaring of laughter came faintly up through the floor, and almost covered the rattle of the doorknob, but I heard, and as it turned, I folded the book shut in my lap with my ringed hand beneath it, hidden, swiftly. It was too early for my father to have sent anyone up for me, and somehow it didn’t surprise me to see Mirnatius standing in the doorway, alone in the hallway, slipped away from the feasting. Magreta went silent and rabbit-frozen next to me, her hands closed over her work. My veil wasn’t even drawn over my face yet, and we were alone, so she should have chased him off. But of course, he was the tsar, and if he were not the tsar, she knew what else he was, too.
“Well, well,” he said, st
epping into the room. “My little protector of squirrels, grown less little. I do not think we can call you beautiful, alas,” he added, smiling.
“No, Sire,” I said. I couldn’t make myself drop my eyes. He was beautiful, and even more seen close: a soft sensual mouth with his beard trimmed short like a frame around it, and his unearthly eyes like jewels. But that wasn’t why I kept my eyes on his face. I was simply too wary of him to look away, the rodent watching the pacing cat.
“No?” he said softly, and took another step.
I rose from my chair so he wouldn’t loom over me. Magreta, trembling, stood up next to me, and when he began to raise his hand towards me, she blurted, “Will Your Majesty have a glass of brandy?” meaning the bottle on the sideboard, with its cut-crystal glass, in a desperate defense.
“Yes,” he said at once. “Not that. The brandy they are serving downstairs. Go and fetch it.”
Magreta locked in place beside me, her eyes darting sideways. “She is not permitted to leave me alone,” I said.
“Not permitted? Nonsense. I give her permission. I will guard your honor personally. Go,” he told her, the command brushing against me like a burning iron fresh from the fire, and Magreta fled the room before it.
I pressed my fingers tight on either side of my ring as he swung his eyes towards me, drawing its cold into me, gratefully. He took another step and gripped my face in his hand, jerking it up. “So what did you tell your father, my brave grey squirrel, to make him think he could force me to take you to wife?”
He thought my father meant blackmail, then. “Sire?” I said, still trying to cling to wooden formality, but his fingers tightened.
“Your father is spending gold like water on entertainments, and he has never been loose with his purse strings before.” He stroked his thumb over the line of my jaw, leaning in; I thought I could smell the sorcery in him, a sharp pungent mix of cinnamon and pepper and resin of pine, and deep below it burning woodsmoke. It was as lovely and seductive as the rest of him, and I felt as though I could choke on it. “Tell me,” he said softly, the words heating my face like breathing onto a cold pane of glass in winter to cover it with fog.
But my ring stayed cold, and the flush faded out of me. I didn’t have to answer him. But not answering—that would be its own answer. “Nothing. I wouldn’t have,” I said, giving him that much honesty, trying to pry him off me.
“Why not? You don’t want to be tsarina, with a golden crown?” he said mockingly.
“No,” I said, and stepped back from him.
Surprise loosened his fingers and slipped them off my face. He stared at me, and then a terrifying eagerness rose up through his face, distorting the beauty for a moment like the ripple of the air above a bonfire. I thought there was almost a red glow in his eyes as he took another step towards me—and then the door opened and my father came into the room, alarmed and also angry: his plans were being spoiled, and he could do nothing to stop it.
“Sire,” he said, and his lips thinned when he saw that my hand was concealed beneath my book. “I was just coming to bring Irina downstairs. You are kind to have looked for her.”
He came to me and held his hand out for the book, and reluctantly I gave it to him, the silver of my ring flashing cold between us as he took it. I looked at Mirnatius, and waited grimly for a frown of puzzlement to come into his face, to see the magic catch him, but his eyes were already alight with hunger and pleasure, and his expression did not change at all. He was watching me, only me, and he had not a glance to spare for the ring.
After a moment’s longer staring, he blinked once, that heat-shimmer glaze clearing from his eyes, and turned to my father. “You must forgive me, Erdivilas,” he said after a moment. “Your words kindled an irresistible desire in me to see Irina again, without the noise of the hall between us. You have not spoken falsely, at all. There is indeed something most unusual in her.”
My father paused, surprised; as if the rabbit had suddenly turned and leapt at the hound. But his determination carried him past this unexpected moment. “You honor my house by saying so.”
“Yes,” Mirnatius said. “Perhaps she might go down without us. I think we should discuss her marriage at once. She is destined for a very particular bridegroom, I think, and I must warn you that he is not inclined to patience.”
CHAPTER 10
Every day that week, Miryem’s father asked me, a little puzzled, “Wanda, have you seen Miryem?” and every day I reminded him that she had gone to Vysnia. Then he would say, “Oh, of course, how foolish of me to forget.” Every day at dinner, Miryem’s mother put out a fourth place, and filled it, and then they both looked surprised again to find her gone. I didn’t say anything because they gave me the full plate to eat.
I did the collecting, writing the lines carefully in the book. Sergey and I looked after the goats and the chickens. We kept the yard tidy, the snow packed hard and brushed smooth. On Wednesday I went to the market and did the shopping, and a man who had come in from the north selling fish asked me if Miryem had any aprons left: he had seen others wearing them and he wanted them for his three daughters. There were three aprons left in the house. A huge daring knot rose in my throat. I told him and said, “I can go and fetch them if you want. Two kopeks for each.”
“Two kopeks!” he said. “I can’t pay more than one.”
“I can’t change the price,” I said. “My mistress is away. She hasn’t sold them to anyone for less,” I added.
He frowned, but he said, “Well, I’ll take two.” When I nodded and said I would go get them, he called after me to bring all three. I went and got the aprons and I brought them back to him. He inspected them backward and forward, looking for any loose threads, faded dye. Then he took out his purse and counted out the money into my hand: one, two, three, four, five, six. Six kopeks, shining in my palm. They weren’t mine, but I closed my hand on them and swallowed and said, “Thank you, Panov,” and then I took the basket and walked out of the market, until no one else was looking at me, and then I ran all the way back to the house and burst in breathless. Miryem’s mother was putting dinner on the table. She looked at me in surprise.
“I sold the aprons,” I said. I thought I might cry. I swallowed and held the money out to her.
She reached out and took it, but she didn’t even look at the coins. She put her hand on my face—so small, and thin, but warm. She smiled up at me and said, “Wanda, how did we manage without you?” She turned away to put the money into a jar on the shelf. I hid my face in my hands, and then I wiped my eyes with my apron before I sat down at the table.
She had made too much food again. “Wanda, could you eat a little more? It’s a shame for food to go to waste,” her father said again, sliding the fourth plate to me. Miryem’s mother was looking out the window with a strange expression on her face, a little confused. “How long has Miryem been gone?” she asked slowly.
“A week,” I said.
“A week,” her mother repeated, as if she was trying to fix it in her head.
“She’ll be home before you know it, Rakhel,” her father said, in a hearty way, as though he was trying to convince himself.
“It’s a long way,” her mother said. That strange anxious look was still in her face. “It’s so far for her to go.” Then she pulled herself around and smiled at me. “Well, Wanda, I’m so glad to see you enjoy the food.”
I don’t know why, but the thought came into my head very clear: Miryem is not coming back. “It’s very good,” I said. My throat felt strange. “Thank you.”
She gave me the day’s penny and I walked slowly home. I thought, Miryem would always be about to come back. They would wait for her and wait for her. Every day they would set a place. Every day they would be puzzled she had not come. Every day they would give me her share of the food. Maybe they would give me her share of other things, too. I would take care of Miryem’s work. Miryem’s mother would smile at me again the way she had today. Her father would teach me mo
re numbers. I tried not to want those things. It felt like wishing she would not come back.
I went and buried my penny at the tree, and then I went to the house and stopped near the door. There had been footprints in the road all along the way as I walked. That was not so strange. There were other people who lived along the road. But now I saw the footprints had turned off the road and gone all the way to the door of my house: two men, with leather boots, and that was very strange. It wasn’t time for the tax collector. I slowly went closer. As I came near the door, I heard laughter and men’s voices, making a toast. They were drinking. I didn’t want to go in, but there was no help for it. I was cold from the long walk, I needed to warm my feet and hands.
I opened the door. I didn’t have any idea of what I would find. Anything would have surprised me. It was Kajus and his son Lukas. They had a big jug of krupnik on the table and three cups. My father was red in the face, so they had been drinking a while already. Stepon was huddled in the corner by the fireplace, making himself small. He looked up at me. “Here she is!” Kajus said, when I came inside. “Close the door, Wanda, and come and celebrate with us. Go on, Lukas, go help her!”
Lukas got up and came to me and stretched up to try to help me take off my shawl. I didn’t understand why he bothered. I took it off myself and hung it near the fire, and my scarf with it. I turned around. Kajus was beaming at me all the time. “I’m sure it will be a sorrow to you to lose her,” he said to my father, “but such is the lot of a man with a daughter! And her home will not be far.” I stood still. I looked at Stepon. “Wanda,” Kajus went on, “we have settled it all! You are going to marry Lukas.”